Larry Summers Archives - Lend Academy

Larry Summers Has Resigned From the LendingClub Board

The former Treasury Secretary is being replaced by Stanford Economics Professor Susan Athley

March 29, 2018 By Peter Renton Leave a Comment

Larry Summers speaking at LendIt USA 2015

I still remember the day well. It was back in December 2012 when the LendingClub PR people reached out to me to say they had an announcement of a high profile new board member. I am normally a bit skeptical of these announcements because a PR person’s definition of high profile and mine were usually quite different. That was not the case here.

When I heard it was Larry Summers joining the board I was astounded. Here was a former Treasury Secretary under President Clinton and former head of the National Economic Council under President Obama believing our industry was going places. Keep in mind this was back in 2012. LendingClub was two years away from their IPO and while they were getting traction (they had just crossed $1 billion in total lending the previous month) in many ways they were still a startup. The industry as a whole was still very much unknown and this announcement really grabbed everyone’s attention, including mine.

Yesterday, we learned that after nearly six years Mr. Summers will be leaving the board of LendingClub. He is being replaced by leading economist and Stanford professor Susan Athey. While she is not nearly as well known as Larry Summers she still brings serious economics clout to the board.

She is the Economics of Technology Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. In 2007, she was awarded the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal for the best American Economist under the age of 40. Her recent academic research and teaching focuses on platform competition, financial technology, the impact of the internet and social media on consumer behavior, and new econometric methods for analyzing big data. Interestingly, she also sits on the board of travel marketplace Expedia as well as blockchain startup Ripple.

According to LendingClub’s press release here is what Professor Athey had to say about joining the board: [Read more…]

Wrap-Up of the LendIt USA 2015 Conference

April 17, 2015 By Peter Renton 1 Comment

What a week. I have been in New York putting on the latest edition of LendIt, the online lending conference that I co-founded just a couple of years ago.

We had our first LendIt USA conference in New York in June 2013 with just over 350 people; in San Francisco last year we had almost 1,000 people so this year we were expecting around 1,500 people although we secretly hoping for 2,000 people.

LendIt USA 2015 Was Sold Out

We had almost 1,000 people register in the two weeks leading up to the conference and so we made the difficult decision to close down registration on Friday, three days before the conference began. The final count for attendees was 2,493 people, a 159% increase over last year. As Scott Sanborn, the COO of Lending Club, pointed out at the opening reception that was a faster growth rate than his company. And we had to turn away over 150 people who tried to register last minute.

The Pre-Conference

We kicked off LendIt USA 2015 a half-day earlier than usual with some pre-conference workshops. We had four tracks:

Credit Boot Camp for Alternative Lending Presented by FICO
P2P Lending 101
The Online Lending Technology Ecosystem
Building an Online Lending Platform

Like the rest of the conference we had more people attend these workshops than expected so it was a little crowded, particularly at the FICO workshop. I gave the first presentation on the P2P Lending 101 track, which was just an intro to the industry. Executives from Lending Club had the stage for the rest of the P2P Lending 101 track and judging by the questions there were a lot of newbies in the room – exactly what we had hoped. I heard great reports from the other tracks and I would have loved to attend all of them but I spent most of my time in the P2P Lending 101 track.

That evening we had the pre-conference cocktail party, sponsored by Lending Club, where several hundred of us gathered for drinks and hors d’oeuvres overlooking Times Square.

Some of the Highlights

While it would require a full book to cover all the highlights of LendIt what I will do below is give you some of the highlights.

Renaud Laplanche Keynote

[Read more…]

Update on LendIt USA 2015

March 10, 2015 By Peter Renton 9 Comments

The next LendIt conference is just over a month away so I wanted to give everyone an update on how things are going. As of right now we have over 1,100 people registered for LendIt USA 2015 on April 13-15 so we are well on our way to our goal of 1,500 people by game time.

For those of you new to Lend Academy allow me to briefly explain what LendIt is and who attends. LendIt was the first conference in the P2P lending space (I am one of the co-founders), launching in 2013, when 350 people attended the inaugural event in New York City. Last year, we were in San Francisco in May where 950 people attended and we also expanded internationally with successful events in Shanghai and London.

LendIt is all about bringing together the investors, platforms and service providers in our industry for networking, business development, education and fun. We have multiples tracks of content including keynote presentations and panels, company demos, workshops as well as cocktail parties. You can see the complete preliminary agenda here.

An A-List of Speakers Headlined by Larry Summers